Thoughts over the first few sips of wine

Sunday, March 13, 2011
10:58PM

I'm thinking again, and I suppose I oughtn't. Then again, pensar es servir. Recently I had to replace my ink cartridge. Tonight I needed to print the 12-page speech I have prepared for myself so that I can give it tomorrow. Unfortunately, the printer didn't recognize that there was, in fact, a cartridge in the printer. So John and I went down to Brooks and he printed it for me there. I think he was more upset about it than I was. I think I'm a little numb to getting really upset about things right now. I've been like that this whole weekend, which is unusual for me when I'm under this heavy a workload. But I just keep thinking about Japan, and it makes me sick. The biggest earthquake in Japan since records began 140 years ago, and one of the top 10 ever. Watching the footage just makes me... well, I'm being redundant, but... sick. One second homes are sitting in happy order, the next that wall of water rushes through them making them pool toys. I seriously have tears in my eyes right now and will be crying soon. I just hate this so much. I think about what it would be like to wake up, maybe my spouse was working a night shift, and now... he's never making it home. Or... I've got my car in the highest gear and I'm trying to drive away, but the water eclipses me and I'm done. I'm breathing, healthy, full of fight, and Mother Nature decides it's simply time to crush me. My heart is breaking. Some things I've heard in relation to what's going on, ignorant political statements really, just kill me. How can you think about borders and history at a time like this? I hate history classes in some ways. It's good to learn about the past, I suppose... but a lot of time all it does is perpetuate hate. Why else would a child in my seventh grade history class be proclaiming that he was going to kill those Japs? And it makes me think about borders and rules on a scale beyond the current. So many times we aren't supposed to care about someone, love someone... because they're from another place. Or someone is in "your" home, or you're in "theirs," and one or the other of you is supposed to feel displaced. I listened to John Lennon's "Imagine" earlier, because I needed some healing music, and one of my favorite lines is Imagine there's no country... imagine all the people, sharing all the world. What if we didn't think in terms of countries and borders? What if this didn't happen to "Japan" but part of our own selves? After all, national borders are nothing more than arbitrary lines drawn by cartographers. If you were on the border between the US and Mexico, as it was before fences and immigration officers, you wouldn't have known where one country ended and the other began. I've been working all weekend on this presentation about Mexico. Some of the people I love and who are close to me have very big problems with the ideas of immigration. This is "our" country. But... it isn't. Yeah, we pay the taxes here, but there's a bigger law, a better, more perfect law, which yes, I believe is God's law. This is God's world; we're sharing it for a time, and to play keepsies from Mexicans is about as juvenile as one sibling holding a gift from a parent over the other sibling's head. I know there are politics, and I don't want to argue. I just wish people would love each other already. And it can be argued that that's overly simplistic. Maybe it is, but when love is at the center, things do become simpler.
So, they're on the verge of nuclear meltdown in Japan. That depresses and scares me, too. I know that "we're safe" from the meltdown and all that, but it's just so sad... to think of a power that can be used for so much good getting turned into destruction. How would it be to wake up to a huge hole in the ground where your town used to be? And I think of humanity in those terms frequently, capable of such infinite goodness, often screwing it all up, perpetuating hate and hurt. And one of the ways I envision us doing this, eventually, is with nuclear war. It terrifies me, but mostly... depresses me. The way Hitler was born with the same DNA as any of us and just became... bad. What if Hitler had had a nuclear bomb? What if someone like Hitler gets hold of one such a bomb eventually? I used to have apocalyptic dreams all the time. A radiation wave from a blast was always coming at me. When I first started having the dreams, I was nothing but terrified, running, knowing I couldn't get a way, but in my dreams time was warped... those milliseconds between realizing I couldn't escape and the wave actually touching me stretched on infinitely. In the more recent versions of the dream, I just felt a sense of futility and surrender, depression. There we were, humanity, capable of such a beautiful life and world together, about to be completely obliterated. That's the upsetting part, not the horror of death or mass destruction, but the knowledge that it could have been so much better. What makes us chose fear over love? Over and over again? Why do we do that? I wish we could just recognize, yes, this is temporary, but it's no excuse to not fall in love every day. These things we love and experience, they're gifts. They were never for us to hold onto, so why begrudge their going? We do, of course. It's our nature. But... what if we could... just be, and be in love?